They Marched Into Sunlight (41 page)

There would be monitors leading the way to the demonstrations, instructing participants on when to walk and when to sit, and Evan Stark would be in overall charge. No professors were joining the protests, one speaker noted, because “the rally was far too radical for them.” Maurice Zeitlin, the leftist sociologist, was mentioned specifically as a professor who opposed the obstruction tactic. As the meeting neared an end, Evan Stark rose to speak. He said there was no reason to be too defensive. “You can bet the university will not be brutal by bringing in the police,” he said. If things did get violent, there was “no reason at all that if you are hit by the police that you can’t hit back,” he added, but he did not expect that to happen. As another note taker at the meeting, an assistant dean, recorded it, Stark “felt very strongly that the University would not even drag people out of the building”—a prediction that he based on the experience of the antidraft sit-in at the administration building in 1966, when there were so many people taking part that the Madison police reacted cautiously. As Stark recalled it, when Chief Emery was asked during that earlier protest whether he intended to impose mass arrests, he responded by saying, “Are you crazy?” There would be no bloodshed, Stark said.

That is the impression that Jonathan Stielstra took away from the Great Hall meeting, as did many others in attendance that night. Over at the Ivy Inn, Curly Hendershot girded for what he figured might be a trying couple of days, though the worst the Dow men anticipated was that they might be trapped inside an interview room for a few hours. Hendershot had his own contingency plan. In his briefcase he was packing a ham sandwich so that no matter what happened on campus, he would not miss lunch.

Chapter 14

For Want of Rice

T
HE TOUGH LITTLE PIECE OF
V
IETNAM
known as the Long Nguyen Secret Zone held no secrets from Nguyen Van Lam. This was his home territory. He knew the hamlets, the rice paddies, the buffalo trails through the tall grass and secret paths through the jungles. He was at home in the forest, and forest is how his name, Lam, translated into English. He was born in the nearby village of Long Nguyen in 1946, the year of the dog. His parents worked a small plot of rice and like many farmers in that area supported the liberation forces, first against the French, then against the Americans. Some families did this because they wanted to, some because they felt they had no choice. Lam was not coerced. He fought alongside the local guerrillas when he was in his middle teens and at nineteen joined the communist-led forces of the People’s Army of Vietnam, preferring it to the other side, the Army of South Vietnam, which had just drafted him.

Now, at age twenty-one, Lam was company commander of C1, a security unit that protected the perimeter of a base camp for Rear Service Group 83. He had no uniform to speak of, just the traditional lightweight pants and shirt, usually black, sometimes blue, and homemade rubber-tire sandals. He carried a Thompson submachine gun. Over the course of two years he had seen the big-nosed Americans only occasionally. There were two battles during that period, and every month or so a patrol might come near. He had become intimately familiar with the hardware of the U.S. military. He knew how to time the bombing runs of the massive B-52s, which circled round again with metronomic precision thirty or forty minutes apart. He had witnessed the destructive power of cluster bombs, napalm, and 105-millimeter howitzers. Trouble arrived in a swarm of helicopters. There was nothing fun about his youth, he once said, smiling and gesticulating, his high, cackling voice like that of an excited rooster. It was all work, all war.

A military doctor from Hanoi once told oral historian James Zumwalt that working in the southern jungles during the war of resistance against the Americans was “like being Robinson Crusoe on the island.” Everything had to be foraged and improvised; success depended on sweat and ingenuity. The quintessential example was of a soldier pedaling vigorously on a stationary bicycle in the tunnel complex of an underground hospital to power a generator that kept the lights flickering in the operating room. The Crusoe analogy aptly conveyed the need for adaptive skills, but in this case there were hundreds of thousands of Crusoes functioning inside South Vietnam, all supported by an intricate logistical network, of which Rear Service Group 83 was a small but integral part. The conditions demanded improvisation on the ground, but at least on paper it was all part of an elaborate bureaucratic plan.

Like other aspects of the war, the logistical command flowed from Hanoi, overseen by the General Directorate for Rear Services. As one of three main directorates in the National Ministry of Defense, Rear Services was responsible for moving men and materiel south and sustaining the war effort there. Its functional arm was the famed Group 559, which created and operated what became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. From the time Group 559 was formed at the dawn of the war in May 1959 (hence its name), it had grown into a massive logistical unit of nearly fifty thousand men who ran twenty-five military stations along the trail and were divided into six departments and twenty-three regiments: six engineering regiments, six antiaircraft artillery regiments, one surface-to-air missile regiment, three vehicle transportation regiments, two regiments for maintaining the POL line (petroleum, oil, and lubricants), two for assisting the Pathet Lao (for the trail’s path through Laos), one communications regiment, one for driver training, and one for rest and recuperation.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail, which started as a scraggy walking path wending south along the spine of the Truong Son range, had evolved over the years into a veritable interstate system of jungle-shrouded trails and roads (some, by the fall of 1967, allowing motorized transport) that snaked down through North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, with several arteries slicing west to east at entry points for B4, B3, and B2, the military fronts in the combat zones of South Vietnam. Each front in turn had its own rear service department. The rear service headquarters for B2 Front had offices for plans, political affairs, quartermaster, armaments, military medicine, finance, administration, and supply purchasing, in addition to a medical technician school, a pharmaceutical production unit, a drug storage site, the 320th hospital, three makeshift armories, and three units responsible for recruiting and managing people to grow and harvest rice and raise pigs and chickens. Finally, hidden deep in the jungles of B2 Front, there were five rear service groups that maintained their own base camps and were responsible for providing food, clothing, and supplies to the mobile regular army units in the area. Rear Service Group 83, with most of its operations in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone, served a strategically vital function, located as it was in the vortex of the southern action, halfway between War Zone D and War Zone C on an east-west axis, and between the Cambodian border and Saigon running north-south.

Food, mail, and medical care,
read the list in General Westmoreland’s wallet, reminding him of what made an army function well, and it was no different with the other side. The communist forces did not build forty ice cream plants, and they did not have resupply helicopters to ferry hot meals and pastries to troops in the field, but they placed the same emphasis on feeding soldiers.

The results were mixed, but the effort was enormous. There were a variety of means for getting food to Rear Service Group 83 base camps and then on to the fighting units. Less than one percent of the rice and other food was produced by military agricultural teams or civilians working directly for the Viet Cong in combat hamlets. More rice could be obtained from local farmers. This involved coercion at times, but more often the motivation was neither political nor physical but financial. If a food broker was paying a farmer X amount for fifty kilograms of rice, and the broker then sold it to a processor for X plus two, who in turn sold it to a retailer for X plus three, an agent for the Viet Cong would cut out the middlemen and offer the farmer X plus two or three. “The reasoning process involved was, ‘I can make more money selling it to the agent. Why should I not sell it to him?’” said Robert DeStatte, a former U.S. Army interrogator who became expert on the methods of the enemy after conducting hundreds of prisoner of war interviews. There were also purchasing networks in several local villages that helped the rear service group acquire other foodstuffs. An agent would approach a woman and ask her to purchase ten cans of sweetened condensed milk for him the next time she went to market. He would give her enough money to buy fifteen cans. In doing that small service she also helped her family. The modest amount was less likely to come to the attention of local authorities, but if the agent had fifty people in the area willing to make the same deal, he could buy a substantial supply of food and other necessities, including antibiotics, bandages, and vitamin supplements.

Along with materiel, nearly half the food was supplied by Hanoi and came from outside the region into B2 Front through transshipment points along the Cambodian border. From there rice would be hauled to Rear Service Group 83 base camps on old one-speed bicycles that were double-tired and reconfigured with wooden poles so that each could carry up to four 220-pound bags, or a total of 880 pounds of rice per bike. The task required men and women of uncommon strength and stamina. They traveled long distances over jungle paths less than a meter wide, fording rivers and crossing streams on creaking monkey bridges made of bamboo. Group 83 held elections every year to honor the best bicycle rice transporter. Nguyen Van Lam was not strong enough for the job. It would have killed him, he said later. He weighed less than 110 pounds.

There were no temperature-controlled warehouses to store rice once it reached the jungle base camps. Some was amassed underground, most in thatch-roofed huts, protected from the soggy ground by nylon stretched over ropes and poles. Depending on the weather and storage conditions, the rice might rot after a few months, and it was constantly being destroyed by American bombing attacks and infantry patrols. According to mandates of the Rear Services Directorate, Group 83 was never to allow the storage level of rice to fall below fifty tons and also was supposed to receive three days’ advance notice that a fighting unit was coming in for food and resupply.

In practice things were different. When the First Regiment of the Ninth Division came traipsing into the Long Nguyen Secret Zone, there was no warning and no rice. October had been a difficult month for the First Regiment, as had all of 1967. The proud First had been badly hurt during the year’s early fighting in Operation Junction City (Gian-xon Xity, the Vietnamese called it, using the phonetic spelling for Junction that was similar to that used for Johnson, as in President Gian-xon). After that battle the unit had moved east to the jungles north of Phuoc Vinh in War Zone D, where its responsibility was to defend a logistics supply route that ran diagonally from central headquarters near the Cambodian border north of Tay Ninh across and down to the South China Sea above Vung Tau. It was also directed to recuperate, rearm, replenish its manpower, and prepare for the next offensive. But there were more problems in War Zone D. Some villagers had rallied to the Americans and gave away the regiment’s location, resulting in another fierce battle with elements of the Big Red One near Bau Chua in September. Equally troublesome, Rear Service Group 81, which was in charge of that sector, by October had run out of rice. The complex logistical network was of no use: there was no rice to be bought, no rice to be harvested, and no rice in storage.

Twelve hundred soldiers in the First Regiment had virtually no food. They avoided starvation by eating baby bamboo shoots and boiling a plant known as stink grass, a distasteful weed that in the north was used as fertilizer.

The regimental commander, whose revolutionary name was Sau Hung, had already left for central headquarters near Cambodia to take part in planning for the next offensive, leaving the hungry regiment under the command of Vo Minh Triet, his deputy. Triet was given orders to move the unit from War Zone D west and then north to a staging area along the Ba Chiem stream, where they would prepare for a massive, multiunit attack on the city of Loc Ninh. It was not part of the plan to stop halfway on the march west and spend several days in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone. Triet took his regiment there for one reason only, to search for rice. He was disappointed to discover that Rear Service Group 83 had no rice either. After meeting with the logistics commander, he set up temporary quarters there to await the next shipment of rice, which was said to be imminent. His engineers dug a water hole near the draw and they boiled more stink grass.

Triet’s purpose was to get the food and move on, but now something else was in the way. On his first night American high-performance jets screeched overhead and dropped an assortment of cluster bombs and napalm bombs on the jungle. Helicopters were sighted, and it appeared obvious to Triet that an American battalion was nearby, looking for him and his men. There had been two minor scrapes since his regiment had arrived. He had no food, but firepower was not a problem. His three battalions were fully armed with AK-47s, along with DK-2 antitank weapons, Chinese- and Soviet-produced recoilless rifles, mortars, howitzers, rocket-propelled grenades, the Chinese equivalent of M-60 machine guns, heavier .50-caliber machine guns, and DH-10s, a variation of the claymore mine that was three times larger than an American-made claymore and had two hundred fragments packed inside. He had several local security units, including Nguyen Van Lam’s C-1 Company, and local guerrillas who knew every foot of the territory. He placed two battalions of his First Regiment in the jungle on the west side of the draw and one battalion on the east side. He set up a communications network with hardwire telephone lines and placed radiomen high in trees along various paths leading into his camp. Then he waited for the Americans. He did not know who they were. It was not his job to know. His job was to get to the Ba Chiem stream.